Medical applications of lasers are now routine, but new methods continue to emerge. Lasers have long been used in medicine for surgery, with applications ranging from cauterization of blood vessels to drilling holes through the heart. Now, though, laser-based diagnostic devices are also proliferating in areas such as biomedical imaging and basic biological research. Ultrafast lasers are credited with making many of these applications possible.

Lasers have prominent applications in relatively new fields like optical tomography, which uses ultrashort laser pulses to detect abnormalities within the body, laser speckle flowimetry, which is used to detect changes in the blood flow within tissue. In biological research, an important trend in recent years has been the development of all-solid-state systems that use high-performance lasers for mapping of many biologically important substances such as oxygen and calcium. Laser surgery, while the oldest application of lasers in medicine, is also expanding in scope. Femtosecond lasers have an amazing array of possible applications, and this is especially true in the health and medicine industry. The unique properties of ultrashort pulse lasers that make them effective for micro-processing are also highly useful for performing complex or delicate surgical procedures. Syntec Optics provides custom plastic optics for many critical laser applications.